The G-20 Summit: Saving Humanity
From The April Fools

Helga Zepp-LaRouche
April 4, 2009:

Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche is the founder of the Schiller Institute and the chairwoman of the Civil Rights Solidarity Movement (BüSo) in Germany.

HARLEY SCHLANGER: Good afternoon, and welcome to The LaRouche Show. Its Saturday, April 4th, 2009; Im Harley Schlanger and I will be your host.

Last Thursday, the day after April Fools Day, the leaders of the Group of 20 gathered in London, allegedly to discuss the deepening economic collapse, which is plunging the world at an accelerating rate into a New Dark Age. The summit itself was a disaster with no serious discussion of the causes of the crisis, nor the solutions. A big part of the problem is that U.S. President Barack Obama fell into a trap, one designed the City of London fascists who run British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and his ally inside the Obama Administration Larry Summers. These fascists are out to destroy the United States, and ensure that there will be no Four Powers agreement as developed by Lyndon LaRouche to organize a New Bretton Woods monetary system.

In commenting on President Obamas performance at the G20 summit, LaRouche said that he behaved in “in an insane fashion.” He added, “I dont think Obamas a victim. But hes a perpetrator by virtue of a tragic character, that his ego got in the way, and everybody had his profile, and they pulled it, and he wouldnt listen to decent advisors.”

The most important person with advice for Obama, whose advice was unfortunately rejected is Mr. LaRouche, who not only forecast this crisis, as it was occurring but has repeatedly offered a clear solution. There are now other economists paying attention to what Mr. LaRouche has been saying, even though their advice sadly has also been rejected.

Today on The LaRouche Show, we have Helga Zepp-LaRouche as our guest. Helga, whos the chairwoman of an electoral party in Germany, the BüSo, will review the results from the G20 and provide her insights on what must be done to reverse the effects of another disastrous summit. Also joining us, will be my old friend, Leandra Bernstein, one of the editors from LaRouchePAC TV. Helga, welcome to The LaRouche Show.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche

HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes, hello.

SCHLANGER:: What, if anything, happened at the G20 summit in London?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, it is actually an unmitigated disaster. And I was watching more TV yesterday and the last couple of days than usual, because I wanted to get a sense of what is actually transmitted by the media to the population, and there could not be a greater contrast between how the media were playing it, and what actually happened. And I think this is an important element, because people will be completely fooled and they think this was a big unity, and there was big discussion and so forth. But if you really look at the substance of what happened, it is a total catastrophe!

Now, this will become clear very, very quickly. Ill just give you some of the elements which have not been discussed. The most important element, which was not even mentioned, is what should happen with the quadrillions of dollars of toxic waste, the international banking community is still sitting on  that was not touched at all. Instead, they decided to do more “quantitative easing” as they call it. Now, this is really in the tradition of Orwells Newspeak, because “quantitative easing” just means “printing money.” And in the final document, they said until the end of next year, they will inject another $5 trillion into the system. But even worse than that, they decided to increase the role of the IMF, and give them altogether $750 billion worth of Special Drawing Rights.

SCHLANGER:: Let me just ask you, on this IMF question, giving the IMF more power: Have none of them looked at the past IMF interventions over the last two decades? I mean, are they all that blind and ignorant?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, it is unbelievable. The IMF was virtually dead, because they were a complete failure. Just look at the condition of Africa, that is in large part the result of the conditionalities of the IMF. Look at the condition of Latin America. Look at what they did in the so-called “Asia crisis” in 97, where  I mean, you go to any South Korean, or Indonesian, or Philippine representative and you ask them about the IMF, and they will you that not only did the IMF not warn them, in 97, about the coming Asia crisis; but when they were in trouble, they kicked them while they were on the ground. So, the IMF was completely discredited.

And you know, this IMF conditionalities policy which was really worsened from the middle of the 70s onward, by prescribing massive austerity policies in the social fields, telling people to cut down health care, to cut down infrastructure and pay their debt. So the IMF is very responsible for the terrible condition of much of the developing sector.

Did they foresee the crisis? No! They had no advice. So why should an organization, which is obviously completely and utterly incompetent, now be the ones fixing the worst crisis in history?

This is a complete sham, and the idea of Special Drawing Rights, its just expanding the idea of so-called “quantitative easing” on an international level. They now will basically allow a supranational institution to print money and this will just fuel the hyperinflationary collapse of the economy worldwide.

SCHLANGER:: Now, there are some countries there as part of the G20, that are from Africa, from Asia, from South America, why would none of them speak up against this IMF proposal?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, I think the idea basically was to impose the model of the British Empire, and I do not know what all went into it. Because if you look how, an economy which is by far the worst in Europe, the British economy is a complete disaster. Anybody who would look at it  the pound sterling collapsed 30% in the last period; the biggest British banks are nationalized because theyre all bankrupt; Britain has plunged to 12th place in terms of GDP in the eurozone, and this “Brownomics” was really what Larry Summers imposed on Obama. And if they can do that, whatever manipulation  I do not want to know what blackmail and exertion of power was used to cause these countries to be quiet! But I think that this is not the end of the story.

SCHLANGER:: Youre listening to Helga Zepp-LaRouche... [station id] Were discussing the disaster that occurred in London this past week.

Now, you mentioned, Helga, as part of the so-called “quantitative easing,” that the idea is that theyll be creating a new money, the SDR, which is through the IMF. And there was discussion before this of replacing the dollar. How far did that go at the conference, if it went at all, and what would be the implications of trying to move away from the dollar?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, you see, if they do that, and already the intention to do it is causing a disaster. Because, I really think that the Chinese government was misled  I dont know by whom and how it happened  but they were not warned either by their economic institutes. And I remember when I was in China in 97, I made presentations at many of the economic institutes, and I told them about my husbands prognosis that the global crisis would erupt in October, and then naturally the Asian crisis did erupt in October, and when I went to China the next the next time, the same people said, “Oh, if we only had listened to you, we would have saved so much money!”

Right now, for China to be lured into this Special Drawing Rights ideas, is going to bankrupt China in ways they have not even considered! Because, if first of all, there is a hope that the U.S. Congress is not going to agree with that: But if there would be an international system where the dollar would be replaced. That would basically mean that the United States, which has tremendous deficits  a budget deficit, a current account deficit, trade deficit  would have to pay in real terms. Also the United States has an immense credit card debt and no savings, so basically, if would force the United States to import only as much as they would have through export surplus or through their own savings. Now, that would mean that the export market for China would collapse dramatically, and China can not switch and abandon the export orientation and go to the development of the interior regions overnight. I mean, we advised them already since the last 15 years that that is what they should have done, but now they are stuck with a very strongly export-oriented economy, and it just will mean that the crisis will be much, much, much worse.

And I dont really know who misled China. I think this is a very, very interesting question, and it just means a complete catastrophe: Because, if you collapse the dollar, and that is what this policy is aiming at and it will do, the whole world will go down with it! So replacing the dollar with SDRs is just a totally insane idea!

SCHLANGER:: Well, theres a new paper from your husband, which we just got a little while ago, called “A New World Currency as Fraud” which I would encourage everyone listening to the program  it should be up on the website [http://www.larouchepac.com/node/9861].

If you have questions and youre listening you can send them to us at radio@larouchepub.com. I have a couple questions for Leandra, but I do have one question that was asked of me by a fairly prominent Republican I talk to here in Texas, about the media “dog and pony show” that seems to be saying “There is a Merkel-Sarkozy alliance against Obama and Brown.” What was that all about?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Oh, that was basically that in the beginning Merkel and Sarkozy were against new conjunctural programs and umbrella packages for the banks, and basically the Anglo-Saxons or the Anglo-Americans were against market regulation. Now the reason for that is very obvious: Because people in Germany have a very, very strong memory of what happened in 1923, when, because of the Versailles Treaty, Germany was forced to pay for the reparations at a much large ratio than the German economy could actually afford. So, what the Reichsbank central bank did at that point, they just started to print money. And for a couple of years, nobody noticed that. But then, in the spring 1923, when the French occupied the Rhineland, and the German working people responded with a strike, and the German economy started to come to a halt, then very, very quickly, from Spring 23 to November, you had the hyperinflation exploding, and a pound of bread shot up, costing 1 reichsmark and in November is was basically in the trillions of reichsmarks. And then the whole thing stopped because it became absurd.

Now, the problem is that people in Germany have that memory “in their bones” so to speak, because everybody still has these bills, trillions of reichsmarks, and billions, and this has been told to generations, with grandparents telling it to their grandchildren. So even Finance Minister SteinbrÂ¸ck, who has not really shown himself to be an economic genius at all  even he, is warning of worldwide inflation. And I think this is the reason why they were resisting it. But then basically that resistance seems to have evaporated, and at the summit they came up with the insane proposal which I mentioned before.

And now the British  and that is very interesting: You know, Sarkozy was saying after the summit, that now the time for banking secrecy is over, and this is a complete fraud. There was a judge in France, de Maillard, who was writing in the French paper Libération, ridiculing the so-called “black list” of countries which have tax havens, and they put such countries, such as Costa Rica, Malaysia, Philippines, and Uruguay on that list! Now this is ridiculous, because Malaysia, for example, is a country which was fighting against speculators like George Soros, and all four countries are countries which have laws, they have judges, and obviously, the real problem cases are the unregulated offshore markets, the Caribbean islands, like the Caymans Islands and others, and they have not been listed. And then, they put out a “white list” of countries which supposedly have no problem with tax havens, and on that list you have countries like London, U.K., Barbados  its completely ridiculous!

So this has been noticed by people. And just today, an article came out in the Financial Times Deutschland, where they say that everybody is now agreeing to have a better coordinated control over the financial sector  except Great Britain! That they absolutely even reject the proposals coming now from Brussels, basically to have an international coordination of regulation and so forth.

So that just confirms my suspicion that London, which is really the biggest problem in this whole case, that they will refuse to have these regulations, because it would basically be the end of their system, and therefore, it was to be expected that they would make problems.

SCHLANGER:: Helga, has there been any coverage in the German press since the summit ended, that indicates that there is an unhappiness or a sense that there is no progress of any sort made, or, are they just going along with the party line?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, I think its quite amazing. Because the media were really playing this thing as entertainment. Of substance, you could hear really no discussion. The media is playing a role which is almost criminal: I mean, if you think that what is at stake here is the biggest collapse in history and the fate of thousands of millions of people is going to be affected, the role of the media in covering this thing up is just unbelievable. For example, you know, they made Obama the big “rock star” who everybody wants to have a benefit of his glory; even the Queen wants to be affected by his glory. Then they played up this business with Michelle patting the Queen on the back, and the Queen didnt mind. And then the big question was which dress is prettier, that of Michelle Obama or that Carla Bruni, the wife of Sarkozy?

SCHLANGER:: That was the main story in the U.S. press today, that they had similar bows on their dresses!

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: [laughs] Yeah! I mean, its totally insane, and they just think the people are completely stupid. The only interesting thing which happened in this morning that I saw here on the TV covering the next summit, which is the NATO summit, where basically somebody said, “Oh, Obamas popularity is still 60%”  which to my knowledge is not exactly true. But then one commentator said, “Maybe its still very popular now, but maybe he will basically turn out to be a badly baked soufflÃˆ sometime in the future.” [laughs] SCHLANGER:: One media which is not almost criminal in its coverage, is LaRouchePAC TV and we have one of the editors from LaRouchePAC TV with us: Leandra, what have we been posting from LaRouchePAC TV? How have we covered the summit?

LEANDRA BERNSTEIN: Well, basically, what Helga went through on these little particulars and these stories coming out of the G20, its not real. It doesnt give you a real sense of where we are in history. And so, with LaRouchePAC TV, what weve been doing, is weve been moving towards more and more productions. And around the G20, what weve been focusing on, just in the past day, is looking at the role of what Obama did  Obamas ego trip to London. And so, the most recent coverage of the G20 summit is a piece we put out yesterday called “Obamas Ego,” and basically, what had happened was that he goes to this summit and he wants to be the most accepted. He wants to be gregarious. He wants to be the center of the party. And as you guys discussed, earlier, he let himself be played, because the British have his profile. They know that he has this big ego problem, and that hes going to forge a consensus to be popular. I mean, if youre in a pit of crocodiles, you dont want to be too popular.

SCHLANGER:: [laughs] Now, also, I know weve put a couple of things up on Larry Summers. What do we have planned for that? Because as Lyndon LaRouche has emphasized, Summers is the most visible operative in the administration who has a long history of supporting deregulation, the repeal of Glass-Steagall  so whatre we going to be doing on the Summers front?

BERNSTEIN: Oh absolutely. Weve already put out I think its three videos at this point, going through Summers support of derivatives trading right after Clinton had called, in the late 90s for a “new financial architecture,” on the heels of the Asian market crisis and then the Russian bond crisis.

SCHLANGER:: Yeah, in September 1998.

BERNSTEIN: Yeah. And he was appointed to a special research group for the President, and he delivered the findings of the group, to say, “well, derivatives, theyre not really the problem; hedge funds arent the problem.” And hes quoted a little bit earlier saying that the reason the United States will stay strong is because of our “sound accounting practices.”

[SCHLANGER: laughs]

So, I mean, this guy is a complete degenerate. Hes a wrecking ball to have in any administration, and the fact that Obama was  to maintain this popularity, this belief that he somehow needed Wall Street, he somehow needed the support of the masses on Wall Street (which is absurd to begin with), to launch a recovery in the United States, pushed him to bump Paul Volcker and bring in Larry Summers as his top economic advisor. And Volcker had come in in the early part of the administration, basically saying, “the recovery of the U.S. economy has to be within the framework of the Glass-Steagall Act,” and that was the act that Larry Summers was key in getting repealed, back during the Clinton Administration.

SCHLANGER:: Helga, before we get into the solution to this and the way forward, I have another question from the German side. Because one of the arguments that especially the British press was playing up, is that the united states is to blame for this, and that this should be acknowledged and recognized. And Im just wondering, to what extent there is a recognition among political layers in Germany, that this is not just a U.S. recession, or a “small problem”: Is it beginning to get through, that this is something equivalent to the blowout of the House of Bardi in the 14th century?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, I think that the population, for sure, has a sense  you know, they may not know exactly what it is, but I think people are quite afraid; I think that people have a sense that something is awfully wrong, but the politicians are not really saying anything of substance. They may say things like, “the thing will bottom out and then maybe in 2010 there will be a recovery, or maybe 2011.” And this is totally crazy, because the thing which has so far completely been lacking, what really is absent altogether, is a serious analysis on why did this happen?

Because, you know up to recently  first of all, in the media, still, theyre saying, “Oh the crisis started beginning 2008,” or “the crisis started after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the big mistake made was that Lehman Brothers was not bailed out.”

SCHLANGER:: Right.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Now, that is a total black propaganda lie, because we know that my husband said, on the 25th July, 2007, the system has already collapsed, and what we will now see is how the different aspect come to the surface. So we are on the mark of having been there saying it all along. And therefore, people who say, “nobody could have predicted that” or “we were all so surprised,” I think this is just a plain lie. And there is still a very coordinated effort going on to not have this discussion, except there is an alternative network building, of people who respond very positively to our demand to have a Pecora Commission, and people agreeing that you need an in-depth analysis of what went wrong with the paradigm of the neo-liberal dogma in the last 40 years.

Because  Im being distracted here 

SCHLANGER:: It does appear that theres been more discussion in the last days of the Pecora Commission, both in the U.S. and internationally.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Im sorry, I couldnt hear your last question.

SCHLANGER:: It seems as though theres been an increase of discussion in the United States and Europe of the need for a Pecora Commission, precisely for the reason you said, cause no one has yet, outside of Lyn, identified why this happened, how it happened.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yeah. I think what is coming together is a perception that you need to discuss not  I mean, first of all, there is a growing community of, lets say, alternative economists or even legal people, people who have been opposing the Lisbon Treaty, people who have been opposing the euro, people who have been opposing all kinds of deregulation, and there is an increased perception that one has to trace back all the different steps which went wrong. And obviously, people are somehow moving towards that, like the blind man toward the elephant: One is grabbing the tail, the other is grabbing the trunk, the other one the leg. And I keep tell people, that the lifes work of Lyndon LaRouche has been to be on the mark of every single step which went wrong in this process, starting with when Lyn, coming back from the Second World War in Burma and India, when he saw how the climate in the United States had changed with the promises of FDR no longer being on the table after Truman came in.

And then Lyn studied all these mathematical models of systems analysis and information theory, and he came to the conclusion that these statistical linear models did not fit real economic processes, and he started to develop his own method of physical economy, based on Riemann, Gauss and other such thinkers.

And then, Lyn, at every point, let it be the tendency of consumerism around the auto industry in the 50s, or the cultural component of the paradigm shift which was changed in the 60s, with the rock-drug-sex counterculture. Then Lyn was absolutely on the mark, by putting his finger on the biggest change, when Nixon decoupled the dollar from the gold reserve standard, and he abandoned the fixed-exchange rates, which was really the beginning of the bubble economy! And then every single step, Lyn was on the mark: In the 80s, he predicted the crash of 87, he predicted the Asia crisis of 97.

And so, I keep telling people the details of this history, because that can be actually a very useful study, if you want to reverse it, and go back to real economy and production, you have to undo all the steps which went wrong!

SCHLANGER:: Now, I want to ask Leandra one more question, before we get to the solution, then: which is that recently youve been involved in discussions with your team and Mr. LaRouche on the increased emphasis on video production. And Im just wondering, what kind of feedback are you getting? Because we are starting to put out more of these 3-, to 5-, to 8-minute videos, that are very sharply focused and timely. Are you getting much feedback? And if not, what do you think needs to be done to generate the kind of response that we need?

BERNSTEIN: Well, were absolutely going in the right direction, because whats missing from the rest, the broader culture, which we can actually provide, is leadership in terms of ideas, not just in terms of tactics, like organizing a protest, but what are the ideas that are necessary from history to actually get us through the biggest crisis, that European civilization has seen? And that requires going back and exploring history; it requires the work on the science. And so, weve had videos that have really been able to break through to the population: the Harvard Yard, the 1932 video, which was incredibly timely around the 2008 election, to prepare, to sort of lay the ground, lay the framework in the population where they can actually receive LaRouches message; they can receive more profound ideas than the slogans that they get otherwise.

SCHLANGER: Leandra, one of the other ones thats very timely right now, as Helga was talking about, would be the Firewall, the 1923 video.

BERNSTEIN: Oh, absolutely. And we have those available, and we have different locals across the country, that people might have run into in the street, doing the work of deploying these ideas directly face to face. But the more people have access to what Lyn is saying through the website and through the videos, sort of building up the context, building up some of the references that LaRouche will make in his papers, that not everybody knows. Our culture has been through quite a lot, and people arent exactly educated. So building up a base of understanding so that people actually act, and act with confidence, in this economic crisis.

SCHLANGER:: I would encourage every one of our listeners to go to the website, the larouchepac.com, and start doing this every single day: It should be a part of your days activity with your morning coffee, your evening beer, or whatever, seeing whats been done during the course of the day from Leandra and the team of people in Purcellville, where they are putting these things out. And not just watching for yourself, but organizing others. Because otherwise, whatre you going to get? From CNN, Fox  Helgas been discussing the terrible coverage in the media. Theyre not only going to not tell you what caused it, but theres no sense of a solution coming out of the coverage. So, its absolutely essential, to get on the www.larouchepac.com website, study these videos, and send in your contribution, so more can be done.

Now Helga, we have plenty of time left to get into the solution. Id actually like to pick up on this question of the Four Powers agreement that your husband has put forward. It seemed to be gaining some momentum, and now it seems around this discussion of the IMF and the move away from the dollar, as though theres a deliberate effort to disorient particularly Russia and China, which has had success right now. Whats happening with that? And what has to be done to change it?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, I think, China is obviously extremely concerned around the economic situation in China. Because they have probably a contraction of 25% or more. Twenty million migrant workers have become unemployed, and a social explosion is clearly building up in that country.

Now, China is now concerned that, with the hyperinflation, which they somehow also know is happening, and with the dollar collapse, as a danger hanging over their head, that they would lose a very large part of their foreign exchange reserves of $2 trillion, which a large part of that is in dollar-denominated papers  U.S. Treasuries, and other such paper. And if you had a collapse of the dollar, then naturally, then that money which is the earning for serious work in China  thats the result of the compensation for the export;, because the United States did not want to export things to China, which China wanted to buy, because of the so-called “dual use clause,” because most things you can use either for civilian or for military purposes and therefore, China was, not by free will  they would have loved to buy certain things from the United States, but that was not sold to them. So therefore, they are sitting on this unbelievably large foreign exchange reserve, which they now look at as possibly vanishing and evaporating. And thats why theyre really freaked out about finding an alternative to the dollar.

And they obviously are being manipulated, believing that they would find some more secure way, by “diversifying” and so forth. Somebody is really running an operation against them, and I think we should really follow this up, and talk to more people. Because, I have a very bad smell about this whole thing.

And I think that in Russia something very similar has obviously happened, because you do have people who understand the nature of the crisis, who do respect the analysis of my husband very, very much. But obviously, there is still a certain faction remaining in the tradition of the same people who basically exploited the situation in the Yeltsin period, monetarists, who were working with monetarist circles in the West. And they are still having a role in Russia around the Finance Ministry and so forth.

So, Im pretty sure that there has been a complete, deliberate manipulation of both countries, with the idea to make them blind to the idea that the solution which was discussed at the G20 in London, has only one function! Its supposed to bail out those people who mis-speculated and basically is supposed to keep the British Empire in tact, and now move in the direction of the IMF as a supranational institution, basically serving the interests of the empire.

Now, I think that that is not going to last very long, because I bet that there soon will be a backlash, because what is at stake is just too much! And I think also the whole question of the IMF will be a topic, because the IMF has hurt too many people in the last years for this thing to go through. Especially, the only medicine they are prescribing is vicious austerity. Look at the case of Ukraine: Ukraine is now in a complete economic free fall. They need $16 billion from the IMF and the IMF will demand even more austerity as a precondition. Now, when Obama came out with the second Geithner plan, the second trillion bailout plan, the Czech Prime Minister Topolanek actually attacked that very strongly and said, “this is the road to Hell”  I mean, he himself had just been kicked out because his economic policies were rejected by the Czech population. But the argument that the Geithner plan is the road to Hell, is absolutely true.

Because, the problem, there are two road to Hell: One is the Hoover policies, which is what the IMF will prescribe; and the other one is “quantitative easing,” and that is what the IMF will also prescribe! So I think that those two roads to Hell must be absolutely rejected, and we need really a different system. And I think the failure of the G20 will become clear, very, very quickly. And then, that means that the alternative, which is the Four Power solution, the idea that my husband has been saying for quite some time now, that you need a changed United States, plus Russia, China, and India, to be the core group to put a real New Bretton Woods on the table. That will be the only option left: and I think we should already basically go into full gear organizing for that. because the failure of this present disaster in London, it will not be long at all before everybody can see that.

SCHLANGER:: Well, on the Russia question, I think we have the dossier on Larry Summers role during the Yeltsin period, working on the looting of Russia. And maybe this is a way to get across to some of the people who have studied Mr. LaRouches writings, that Summers is the one working with the people today who are pushing the same kind of policy. That would seem to be a way to go.

The other point you made, and I would even make it more emphatically, theyre bailing out the swindlers and the crooks who created this crisis! And I did a series of town meetings in the last week, and people are beginning to stir in this country. Theyre beginning to ask at least some of the right questions: “Whos benefitting from this?” And on the other side of this, “How are any of these policies helping people who are losing their homes and losing their jobs?” So, I think the potential for change is accelerating in the United States.

Now, Leandra you said you had a couple of questions for Helga, so Id like to turn it over to you.

BERNSTEIN: Well, actually, yeah. I was talking to one of the youth from Berlin in preparing this video on the world currency, because, its complete nonsense, the idea that youre going to replace the U.S. dollar with this IMF dollar. But we started, and we got to talking about the importance of actually having your own sovereign, national currency. And I thought it would be best to ask someone who lived through having their sovereign currency taken away, and what the effects of that are. And why its so necessary to have sovereignty in that area?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, Im pretty confident that my warnings about the unworkability of the euro very soon will be confirmed. Because, what you have now, is basically a lot of the so-called rim countries, the weaker countries of the euro, like Greece, but also Spain, Portugal, even Italy, they are about to not be able any longer afford being in the euro. Because these countries have such a tremendous state indebtedness, that they have to pay now up to 3% more interest for credit. So for them to refinance their debt, becomes  3% more than, lets say, Germany  so for them to refinance their debt becomes really too expensive, so they probably will not be able to stay in the euro for long.

For a long time, this was pushed away, and people said, “Oh, no! The euro is so good, its so easy now to have one currency in all European countries. It will never go away.” But last week, a neo-liberal conservative economic newspaper here in Germany, Handelsblatt, they had a very strange article discussing the circumstances under which Greece could drop out of the euro, for the reasons which I just said. So, also we know, that in the background, behind closed doors, there is a lot of discussion that the eurozone will not stay together, because the differences between the different countries are just too big.

And you see, in the case of Germany, which remember that the euro was imposed on Germany, which had the very strong deutschmark, as a price for the unification by the unfortunate combination of Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand and Bush Sr., who said that they would allow German unification, only if Germany would give up the d-mark! Now, when that happened, basically, the German economy had to finance all the deficits of the weaker members, and as a price for it, the German domestic market has stagnated for the last ten years: Significantly, wages were relatively low, buying power was low, and then it was always said, “Oh yeah, but Germany can compensate for all of that, because we are champions in exports, world champions of export!”

Well, but that is really the argument of the free trade faction, because, now, where the exports are collapsing, and theyre collapsing savagely  for example the German machine tool exports just collapsed by 45%, and that is almost half, in the last month! And that now means the exports are breaking down, and Germany has a relatively weakened domestic market. And it just shows that this thing is not working at all, and therefore, Germany right now, has very, very big difficulties, and it does not control its own currency, because all the credit policy is controlled by the European Central Bank; and therefore, Germany is really not able to do the kinds of programs which would be necessary.

So, I think this will come, soon, to a point where a break has to occur, and either the break is that of the euro and Germany will go back to the sovereign control of its own currency, the d-mark, or you will have a complete collapse into chaos. And that is the big danger. And you can see that there was already so much violence in the street: Greece, you had weeks and weeks of demonstrators, being violent; you had four governments in Europe falling already over this question  Iceland, Ireland, Hungary, and Czechia, and Latvia. And you had big social upheavals in the Baltic countries, in Hungary; you had 3 million people in the streets in France. And I think soon, it will be clear, this whole thing is not working at all, and a real alternative must be put on the table.

SCHLANGER:: And Leandra did you have a follow up question?

BERNSTEIN: Yeah, because Lyns always emphasizing the Hamiltonian credit system, and he said, recently that all credit is, a nation makes the promise to pay. If they make that promise and they cant fulfill that promise then the credits no good; if they make that promise and they actually can fulfill that promise, then its good credit. But if you have a currency that isnt controlled by your own government  which was Hamiltons big fight: Like you might want to establish liberty, but how are you going to do that if you cant control the economic destiny of your own nation? And it just seems so absurd that leaders of the world, like in Russia, in China, even in the United States, would first of all abandon the dollar, and then look away from controlling their own currency. Just saying, “We dont really need to control our own economic destiny!”

SCHLANGER:: Well, it is a paradox. Helga, I think one of the things I think is worth reporting is that we did initiate this week, a new LaRouche Chinese-language website, which hopefully will have a fairly large readership in a short period of time.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yeah! That is very good, and I already have a couple of my contacts who are totally excited about it.

SCHLANGER:: Well, we have just about 10 minutes to go and there were a couple of things I wanted to get to, but one of the things  what were looking at, and this is the ultimate, the deeper question, what Lyndon LaRouche said yesterday is that, you cant win this fight with populism or with slogans. And Leandra talked about how the video production is oriented to fight that. But he said, you have to go to the deeper, philosophical, historical scientific questions: And Lyn just published a paper for a conference in Ukraine. Theres a conference going on right now with the LaRouche Youth Movement in Virginia on the question of dynamics.

Helga, looking at the collapse of the system, obviously, the fundamentals, the axioms are being challenged. How do you see this in terms of the work internationally, with the LaRouche movement? Do you think people are at a point where theyre ready to drop those axioms and take up something new? And how do you see that working?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, I think, as you can see by this circus of the G20, definitely not yet at the government level. But, I think that there are more and more people  professors, academics, students, networks of all kinds  who are quite clear about the fact that the neo-liberal paradigm has died. That it has died as much as the Communist paradigm died between 89 and 91, and that there is actually right now, a tremendous vacuum, because you dont have yet the new system, but the old system is dead. So there are networks, and we are in contact with a lot of people, and naturally this is what the conference we just had in RÂ¸sselsheim was all about, and some other activities we are planning for the future, that we need a discussion: What is actually the basis on which the economy must be put? And what is the kind of political order which must be put together.

And there are actually people who agree with us, that the only way how you can have a functioning economy and a functioning political order, is that you need to put them in cohesion with the laws of the universe. In places like India, for example, people can easily understand that you need to put the political and the economic order in cohesion with the cosmic order. In other places, they are talking about, like for example in Russia, there is a certain network of people who understand that the political and economic order has to be put in cohesion with the NoË†sphere, a concept which was developed by Vernadsky. So, people have different ways of expressing it, but lets say, some Church circles, they would put it in the form that the political and the economic order has to be put in cohesion with the laws of Creation. So, while these are different ways of naming it, they all point in the same direction: Namely, that you need to have a new world economic and political system, which is in agreement with physical principles of the universe, and it can not be in contradiction to that.

Now, how that will come to an agreement, I think we need a lot of discussion internationally. We have to talk to people about this, but I think eminently its possible to come to this. Because, for example, when Leibniz, at the end of the 17th century said, that if it would ever come to a point where the whole world, and all the governments, would be controlled by utilitarianism, then it would come to a world revolution. Now, I think we are exactly at that point, because  you know, if it needed another proof, then it was this London conference, which was really the fulfillment of Leibnizs prognosis, because this is utilitarianism to the extreme for the sake of the criminals and the speculators. And how much this system has been interwoven with criminality, that not only was demonstrated by Pecora for the time of the 29 crash, but if you look at Madoff, if you look at Sir Stanford, if you look at all these Ponzi schemes, and bandits and gangs which do insider trading  and actually the whole “creative instruments” of Alan Greenspan is just exactly that! Its just Ponzi schemes which sooner or later have to break!

Now, this is coming to an end, and the question is, will there be an American Revolution, reestablishing the sovereign control over credit, or will there be a French Revolution and Jacobinism? And that is really the question on the table. Now, I think, since a Jacobin revolution worldwide would be chaos, it would be mass death, and then, if you look for example that there was this absolutely unbelievable conference in Great Britain last week, where a lot of the economic advisors of Gordon Brown spoke, and they indeed said, that a sustainable development in Great Britain is only possible if you halve the population of Great Britain! Now, they dont say how that is supposed to be done, but we all know it, that if you have massive austerity, no health care, no pension funds, no work for a lot of people, then people are going to die earlier, and that is how you reduce population. And that is really what is at stake.

So therefore, my only hope, and there again, I go to Leibniz, who said, that the human beings are living in the best of all possible worlds. And what he meant by that, is that the degree of freedom is always enlarged by the magnitude of the problem that man is confronted with. And that there is some force inside human beings, which enables them, at least potentially, to answer to every evil with even a greater good. So that, maybe, if enough people around the world are looking at the absolute disaster and potential abyss which we are looking at, that maybe that is the necessary force which causes people to get rid of these oligarchical forces, and schemes, and go back to a Renaissance idea of man. And if I would not have a deep-rooted optimism that that is possible, I would have given up fighting long ago, and I havent!

SCHLANGER:: And Helga, this is an important year where weve celebrated landmark birthdays of Poe, Felix Mendelssohn, Abraham Lincoln, Sholem Aleichem; and this is also, I would think, a year of Schiller, as its I believe the 250th anniversary of his birth. So I think that fits in with just what youre talking about: How to create a human renaissance, get people to start doing work on your beloved Schiller.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes. We planned a lot of activities this year, because I think the work of Schiller is really an inspiration. Naturally, also Poe and Mendelssohn, Lincoln, all these people you mentioned. But I think we need to go to the greatest thinkers mankind has produced, in all of universal history, and actualize their thinking to have the necessary discussion. Because, unfortunately our contemporaries are not so inspiring, most of the time.

SCHLANGER:: [laughs] Well, with that, were at the end of the program. We just got three very interesting emails, so we dont have time to take them up. I will send responses to the ones that I can answer.

So, Helga, thank you very much for joining us today. And Leandra, thank you very much. And again, everyone should go to the www.larouchepac.com and look at these videos. We have Lyndon LaRouches new paper, “A New World Currency as Fraud.” And Helga and Leandra, thank you for joining us today.

Thank you for supporting the Schiller Institute. Your contributions enable us to publish, sponsor conferences, and support other activities which are critical interventions into the policy making and cultural life of the nation and the world.